Intergenerational association of early childhood education and interpersonal violence: a retrospective cohort study

There is a need for research on the effects of primary prevention strategies that modify upstream social and economic drivers of interpersonal violence, especially intergenerationally. We examined the association between maternal exposure to Head Start (a high-quality preschool program for low-income children) and offsprings' risk of violence, hypothesizing that benefits would be greatest for Black and Hispanic/Latino male offspring.

This was a retrospective cohort study using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and intergenerationally linked Child and Young Adult Cohort (NLSCYA) data. Offspring were born between 1970 and 2014, with follow-up from 1988 to 2020. The exposure was Head Start availability in the birth county when mothers were aged 3-5 years. Outcomes were self-reported serious fighting (ages 10-17) and assault conviction (ages 15-25) among offspring. We excluded NLSCYA respondents whose mother was born outside the United States/moved to the United States after aged 5, who were never age eligible to answer the questions about violence, and whose maternal grandmother had a high school degree or higher (i.e., limiting the sample to NLSCYA respondents whose mother was most likely to have attended Head Start).

There were 4,741 and 4,734 NLSCYA respondents in the primary analytic sample for serious fighting and assault conviction, respectively. Maternal Head Start exposure was associated with 0.85 times the risk of serious fighting among offspring (95% CI = 0.71, 1.01), with results driven by Black (RR = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.58, 0.87) and Hispanic/Latino male offspring (RR = 0.73, 95% CI = 0.58, 0.92). No reductions in risk of serious fighting were observed among other subpopulations or for assault conviction, a rare outcome.

Results of this study indicate that high-quality early childhood education may narrow disparities in interpersonal violence across generations, offering novel evidence on population-level and primary prevention programs to promote safety and wellbeing.